Transana Translations

Transana currently provides prompts in nine languages other than English; you can choose any of these alternate languages during Transana installation. No separate version is needed.

Transana's international prompts were translated by volunteers, who graciously contributed their time free of charge. We thank them. The following chart shows the list of non-English language versions of Transana that are currently available during Transana installation. Other translations are always welcome.

Transana Data Support

Transana supports data in many more languages than it offers translations in. However, support for specific languages is somewhat more complex than we might wish.

Prior to version 2.1, support for languages was quite limited. Most Romance languages seemed to work well enough, though media filenames with non-English characters caused problems in the Transana 2.0x line.

Starting with version 2.1, Transana supports Unicode character sets, which means in theory that it should support almost all existing character sets. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there often is. At least for now, Transana's support of Unicode languages is uneven.

The first issue is that of our Graphical User Interface programming components. wxPython's wxSTC, which is the basis for our Transcription window, does not properly support Unicode characters outside of the English and European character sets on the Macintosh. Therefore, we won't be able to support Russian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or other Asian languages on the Mac until this problem is resolved. (We've reported it to the wxPython developers, who promise to look into it.) While Russian, Chinese, and Japanese work correctly on Windows, Korean does not. We will test other languages as there is a demand for them. Also, Transana only supports left-to-right languages at this time, though we've heard a rumor that someone might be working on enabling Hebrew.

The second issue is that of saving data to Transana's database. Both multi-user versions of Transana and the single-user version of Transana on the Mac use MySQL 4.1, which provides "UTF-8" encoding. This means that just about all existing character sets should be supported. However, the single-user version on Windows uses MySQL 4.0, which means that it requires explicit character encoding for many languages. So far, we've enabled Russian (with a translation), Chinese, and Japanese (without translations). Other languages could be supported with explicit encoding for the single-user version of Transana for Windows . If you need support for a particular language, please let us know, and we'll see what we can do.

Practically speaking, if you want to work with data in Chinese, Japanese, or Russian, then Transana for Windows is your only option. If you want to work in Korean, you're just out of luck until the wxPython developers can fix the wx.STC control. If you want to work in Hebrew or other right-to-left languages, you're probably out of luck at least for now. Finally, if you want to work with other non-Romance languages or with multiple languages in the same data set, your best bet is probably to use the multi-user version of Transana for Windows. The multi-user version of Transana for Windows combines our best support for GUI languages with our best database encoding scheme. It is possible to set up all of the components for a multi-user system up on the same computer and work alone, it's just a little more difficult to get everything set up at the beginning. But if you do it, you should be able to work in most languages.